Each year, millions of Americans are adversely affected by stress and trauma, which can have a serious impact on health (Kessler, Sonnega, Bromet, Hughes, & Nelson, 1995). The goal of the proposed research is to analyze how stress and trauma affect health, and how a particular intervention ("emotional disclosure" in the context of group conversations) can lead to benefits. We propose to address these issues by studying the effects of trauma and stress on an urban, largely female, ethnically diverse population of students attending a public college in a large city. Trauma and stress can be harmful; however we hypothesize that the negative effects of trauma and stress on health and psychosocial adjustment can be mitigated through an "emotional disclosure" intervention (cf. Pennebaker, 1997a). The intervention involves expressing one's thoughts and feelings about specific stressful events in a succession of three twenty-minute sessions. We propose to study emotional disclosure in the context of group conversations. A research assistant will provide a group with a topic to discuss. One experimental group will discuss their thoughts and feelings about stresses caused by terrorism subsequent to 9/11. Another group will discuss their thoughts and feelings about the stress of attending college. A control group will talk about a concrete and mundane topic, such as their furniture. One recent study (Crow, Pennebaker & King, 2001) found that expressive writing can lead to reductions in blood pressure. If this is true, then this intervention (a relatively simple and economical form of stress management) may prove to be useful in reducing hypertension. Group disclosure has some advantages over individual disclosure that are familiar to clinicians, who recognize that group treatments can be more efficient and cost-effective (cf. Whitman, 1972; Guilford, 1972; Relinger, Bornstein, Bugge, Carmody, Zohn, 1977). Demonstrating that group disclosure can help to lower blood pressure in some individuals would therefore be a most interesting finding. Thus the proposed research seeks to examine the links between stressful/traumatic events and health in an ethnically diverse population, and to evaluate the effect of a group disclosure intervention on blood pressure (and other health-related indices). The emotional disclosure intervention also involves participants producing narratives about important stressors. We will use computer text analysis and qualitative analysis to study these narratives as sources of detailed information about the stresses and traumas faced by college students, and how these stresses vary depending on demographic variables (cf. Pennebaker & Francis, 1996).